It's a New Year

Bedhead becomes The New Year

Well, ''Macha Loves Bedhead'' is actually the name of a collaborative album the two bands released last year. But Matt Kadane of The New Year, which is really a new incarnation of now-defunct Boston-based Bedhead, admits to a friendship with the Macha boys. Perhaps that's why The New Year chose Athens as one of their tour stops to promote their current album ''Newness Ends.''

''I like Macha,'' Kadane says. ''I like all bands doing things with different instruments ... pushing things in different directions.''

Indeed, says Kadane, that's what The New Year is trying to do with ''Newness Ends.''

''(We're) trying to make music that people are forced to listen to ... they have to sit down and come to terms with it,'' he says. ''That combination of innovation and convention ... if music is going to work in the primeval way it's meant to, you have to appeal to the archetypal elements that music has always had. I don't want to make music that is so perverted that it turns people off.''

The New Year (comprised of guitarist/singer Matt Kadane, his brother, guitarist Bubba Kadane, drummer Chris Brokaw and bassist Mike Donofrio), while trying to have recognizable melodies that appeal to humanity's primitive notion of music, also likes to play around with what Kadane refers to as ''rhythmic time signatures.''

The New Year with Maserati

When: Doors open at 9 p.m. Tuesday, April 3

Where: 40 Watt Club

Cost: call

Call: (706) 549-7871

''One of the challenges of The New Year is making an odd time signature sound normal,'' says Kadane, referring to their use of 5/4 or 10/5 time as opposed to the natural 4/4. ''The challenge of Bedhead was to make slow music powerful and interesting. We came out of the loud punk rock scene (out of the early '90s Texas sound) and my brother and I have always tried to make music that we're not hearing.''

Hence the slow and languid pace of Bedhead.

Now, however, the Kadanes and band are moving into the arena of the adventurous pop song if ''Newness Ends'' is indicative of their sound.

From the hum-able ''Gasoline'' to the rather pretty ''Newness Ends,'' The New Year sounds a great deal like another early '90s band that liked to mess around with the way the ear processed sound by slicing up the normal time/tempo relationship. Pavement fans will like The New Year.

''A lot of these songs (on ''Newness Ends'') started with drums,'' Kadane says of the Bedhead transition into The New Year. ''Bedhead songs started in apartments with little or no drums due to complaining neighbors.''

Will Macha love The New Year with all it's drum beats and pop influences? Probably.

Staff writer Sarah Lee can be reached at slee@onlineathens.com or (706) 208-2229.

This article published in the Athens Daily News on Thursday, March 29, 2001.